Welcome to the official Department of Psychology newsletter!
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Erin Duran wins the 2024 Trisha James Outstanding Staff Award
Erin Duran, program coordinator in the Vanderbilt Psychology Department, has been honored with the 2024 Trisha James Outstanding Staff Award. Her unwavering commitment to creating a positive and supportive environment, paired with her ability to balance professionalism and approachability, makes a lasting impact on both students and colleagues. Erin’s enthusiasm for Vanderbilt shines through in her daily work, making her an irreplaceable part of our community. Read More.
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Adriane Seiffert Wins Inaugural Psychology Department Award for Innovation in Teaching
Dr. Adriane Seiffert, Principal Senior Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor of Psychology, has been awarded the inaugural Psychology Department Award for Innovation in Teaching: Instruction and Course Design. This honor recognizes her innovative teaching methods, including group-based learning strategies implemented in her Industrial and Organizational Psychology course, which significantly enhanced student engagement and understanding. Dr. Seiffert's commitment to teaching, including foundational courses and mentoring students in the Honors program, has a profound impact on the department and its students. Congratulations to Dr. Seiffert on this well-deserved achievement! Read More.
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Tom Palmeri named Cenntenial Chair
Dr. Thomas Palmeri, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, has been named Centennial Professor, recognizing his influential work in visual categorization, category learning, and computational modeling. Leading CATLAB, Palmeri's research has pioneered neural models of decision-making, particularly in speeded response tasks, and explored how experience shapes perceptual expertise. He collaborated with Gordon Logan and Jeffrey Schall on the SCRI neurocomputational model, which links neural spiking and visual attention mechanisms. Palmeri became chair of the Psychology department in 2023. Read More.
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Katrina Rbeiz begins research on Technological Innovation
Katrina Rbeiz, third year graduate student in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program, alongside other Graduate Student Fellows, will begin working on projects and research related to Robert Penn Warren's "Emerging Technologies in Human Context: Past, Present, and Future" theme. Read More.
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Gauthier LabOver the past 20 years, we and other researchers have learned that people vary more than originally suspected in how well they discriminate and identify objects, like birds, cars or even faces.It seems obvious that some people know more than others about birds or cars. Yet, interestingly, there is as much variation in face recognition ability, even though virtually every sighted person has experience seeing faces. Experience with food is also universal. We were curious how much people would vary in their ability to recognize food items. Our tests simply ask people to match images of the same dish among similar ones, or to find the oddball dish among others. People vary a great deal on these tasks, and some of this variation is explained by a general ability to recognize objects of any kind. Read More.
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Hoffman LabDiverse neuron classes in hippocampal CA1 have been identified through the heterogeneity of their cellular/molecular composition. How these classes relate to hippocampal function and the network dynamics that support cognition in primates remains unclear. Here, we report inhibitory functional cell groups in CA1 of freely moving macaques whose diverse response profiles to network states and each other suggest distinct and specific roles in the functional microcircuit of CA1. In addition, pyramidal cells that were grouped by their superficial or deep layer position differed in firing rate, burstiness, and sharp-wave ripple-associated firing. They also showed strata-specific spike-timing interactions with inhibitory cell groups, suggestive of segregated neural populations. Read More.
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